EMC Upgrades Centera

HOPKINTON, Mass. -- EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new software capabilities that double the amount of digital objects its EMC Centera® content addressed storage (CAS) system can archive, while making it easier to manage and secure the fastest growing areas of what IDC calls the Digital Universe, unchanging electronic content such as medical images, e-mail records, financial documents, video and audio recordings and others.

According to an IDC white paper, sponsored by EMC and released this week –The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2011 – the amount of digital information being created is growing at close to 60 percent annually. The report highlights that the diversity of the digital universe can be seen in the variability of file sizes. Because of the growth of VoIP (voice over internet protocol), sensors, and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, the number of electronic information “containers” – relatively small files, images, packets, tag contents – is growing 50 percent faster than the number of gigabytes. The rapid growth in the number of smaller files, most of which are static or unchanging, represents a significant management challenge.

To help businesses and organizations keep up with this growth and securely archive and manage this important information, the newest version of Centera operating software – CentraStar® 4.0 – doubles the amount of objects that each individual disk drive in a system can hold, with each 500 gigabyte or 750 gigabyte drive now able to hold up to 25 million objects. This is particularly helpful in managing a very large quantity of small objects. In addition, the new version of the software, which is available as a free upgrade, improves the self-management and healing capabilities of Centera systems up to 25 percent faster than previous versions.

“Customer archives are being challenged like never before. Big files are getting bigger and the quantity of small pieces of information is exploding,” said, Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division. “In the past, customers were worried about storing millions of emails, while today we have customers with a billion emails in their archive. With these latest enhancements, we continue to lead the industry in delivering cost-effective production class archiving solutions that keep up with the challenges that customers are facing today.”

EMC Corp.